Comment Neelie (Kroes)

God bless to You!

INTERNET NEUTRALITY. ---------------------------------- In the field of telecommunications, I have always distinguished between content and transport. In the beginning, the content was just analog voice and the user had to pay the telephone companies solely for the transport of that voice. With the advent of digitalization the content became just data associated with: voice, images, streaming audio/video and/or any kind of info that could be digitalized. The transport of this new content format, was still taken care of and paid to the telephone companies. Users would pay according to the offered choices (generally: amount of data, amount of bandwidth or flat rate fixed bandwidth). . With the advent of internet, this should not change. I don't see any reason why transport companies should be entitled to discriminate and/or charge users based on source/destination of content. Of course, It is true that some content directly affects their revenues (Skype content for example), but the cost of that transport is being paid to the telephone companies by the sender and the recipient (both of them pay for their internet connectivity). It is also true, that some types of contents require to be treated discriminately (example: low latency is a requirement for real-time audio/video streaming). So, I grant that transport companies, in order to provide the required type of service, should look into the "Traffic Class" bits of the data packet headers. But again, that is done independently of the identity of the sender/recipient of the content and the users should not be charged when provided with these types of differentiated services. Except, may be, in some instances as stated below. When the end-user-access-link to a network has limited bandwidth capacity, in such a way that traffic congestion may occur, then those users that require a specific level of service quality, above the average, should be charged accordingly. However, the only segment of the transport where, at this time, charges could be justified is in the air segment of the cellular/mobile communicatinos. Reason for it: the scarcity of the spectrum. This problem would be alleviated by expanded deployment of femto-cells combined with the tendency to extend fiber cable to the building. Summarizing: It is important to preserve net neutrality. There is not reasonable argument, for transport companies to be allowed to block/delay or discriminate in any way the flow of content on their networks, based on the source/destination of that content. One of the possible ways to insure neutrality is to create/issue the adequate regulation that would require that transport and content provider companies be separated entities. That's to say that transport companies should not compete on the content business and viceversa. BTW, about three years ago, I wrote an article/essay about the evolution of telecommunicatinos. On it, among other topics, I also talked about net neutrality. It is written in Spanish. You may find it at: http://georelatos.com/DOCUMENT... Angelo Gonzalez Vigo, Spain EMAIL: angelodevigo@mundo-r.com